千秋万歳 senshūbanzai A Thousand Years of Long Life

A thousand autumns and ten thousand years: two spans of time set side by side with no verb, the wish for long life at its oldest and most public, and the reader supplies the wish. It was the formula stamped on the roof tiles of Han China and, in Japan, the blessing on a great house's name, that it should continue, before it blessed the emperor's life and then any good occasion at all; the model letter-book every literate Japanese copied for centuries carried it in its New Year passage, which is how completely it naturalized. A buyer will meet its other life first in a Japanese dictionary: men went from gate to gate at New Year chanting these words for a household's fortune and were paid for it, and that art is the ancestor of manzai, the two-man comedy still at the heart of Japanese entertainment; the blessing is the parent and the comedy its child, named for words already ancient when the first performer stood at the first gate. Its meaning can be read straight off its characters, a thousand autumns, ten thousand years, and that is its strength. Whose thousand autumns you wish is yours.

千秋万歳 is composed of the words 千秋 (read senshū) meaning "thousand years, a thousand autumns" and 万歳 (read banzai) meaning "long life and prosperity".

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 千秋万歳.

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